How does this website get away with this? 22 million hits per month for 90% duplicate content.

jamie3000

jamie3000

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Firstly I don't consider this to be outing anyone's website. It's 6 years old, has 23 million hits per month, and has been mentioned multiple times on BHW and SEO Facebook groups I'm in.

bestreviews. guide is an Amazon product review website. What I'd like opinions on is how it's not had a thin content penalty and why amazon allows it to be an affiliate.

All they do is scrape Amazon categories, grab the top items then scrape the "about item" section from the Amazon product page and make a top 10 list of items. They don't even spin it. So 90% of their page is duplicate content from Amazon.

Does google mind? No, it looks like their traffic is actually going up...

I'm pretty sure this considered thin content AND against Amazon terms as an affiliate.

Is it that the website is just sending so much traffic to amazon they don't care? Does google not penalize established websites with decent backlinks as easily?

What are your thoughts?
 
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jamie3000 said:
Firstly I don't consider this to be outing anyone's website. It's 6 years old, has 23 million hits per month, and has been mentioned multiple times on BHW and SEO Facebook groups I'm in.

bestreviews. guide is an Amazon product review website. What I'd like opinions on is how it's not had a thin content penalty and why amazon allows it to be an affiliate.

All they do is scrape Amazon categories, grab the top items then scrape the "about item" section from the Amazon product page and make a top 10 list of items. They don't even spin it. So 90% of their page is duplicate content from Amazon.

Does google mind? No, it looks like their traffic is actually going up...

I'm pretty sure this considered thin content AND against Amazon terms as an affiliate.

Is it that the website is just sending so much traffic to amazon they don't care? Does google not penalize established websites with decent backlinks as easily?

What are your thoughts?
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I can't say who's behind if I am right on this site the reason they get of with it they actually are meant to own a decent amount of Amazon shares if it's right site by the name you said.

For your thin Content idea I would agree Google prefers normally big articles but plenty of sites with like 25 to 100 word articles exist on Google and do well.

For example one of my 25 word articles rankings for I think 75 keywords at the moment.
 
The success of the site is the response to the user. Even if it is scraped content. Responds well to user.
 
austinn2603 said:
I dont know if they have any secret sauce. But if I were a visitor, I would love and buy from this site too. No wonder they have millions visits per month.
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I agree that it's a nice-looking and designed website but their content is machine-generated with no real value. I'm fairly sure their review score system is random because every product I've checked so far doesn't have the same review score order as the amazon products.
 
jamie3000 said:
I agree that it's a nice-looking and designed website but their content is machine-generated with no real value. I'm fairly sure their review score system is random because every product I've checked so far doesn't have the same review score order as the amazon products.
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Perceived value is still value, even if its tangible value is little. Just gives me a few ideas actually... And kind of soft confirms Google doesn't care as long as you make the user happy.
 
leechesBleechin said:
Perceived value is still value, even if its tangible value is little. Just gives me a few ideas actually... And kind of soft confirms Google doesn't care as long as you make the user happy.
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very true
 
jamie3000 said:
I agree that it's a nice-looking and designed website but their content is machine-generated with no real value. I'm fairly sure their review score system is random because every product I've checked so far doesn't have the same review score order as the amazon products.
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That's because you are judging from a SEO perspective. Ordinary users dont know what the hell SEO is, they just think a LOT different from us. If that site makes users happy, then so does Google. That's the ultimate mission of Google, no?
 
I checked SimilarWeb and according to it, 60% is through paid traffic (probably a lot more before when Amazon commissions were higher) and they're probably spending millions of dollars per month on Google Ads. Could it be that they have good relationships with the Google Reps which gives them some protection at least from getting penalized? Very puzzling to me as well.

What seems amazing to me is how they can be profitable with paid traffic given the very low commissions on Amazon. They must have a top-notch bid strategy and tracking to make it profitable.
 
Duplicate content is a very complex thing that Google clearly can't tackle very well

Which was first, the egg or the chicken?

For example, many press releases are duplicating content over and over again to the point they may eclipse the original content due to reputation issues.

Google doesn't fully trust their scrapping technology to the point, that they don't consider the fact of who wrote it first, but "if the content comes from an authoritative source, is fine to be copy pasted".

99,99% of the users in this forum won't have authoritative sites, enough to talk without issues about copying content without problems. This is why, as a rule of thumb, not copying is the best way to go.

But dude, if you have a 61 DR site, eat all you want :)

PS: But you can issue if you want a couple of DMCA requests. Create a product on Amazon with your content, see if they autocopy your text, and then set a DMCA request to that site.
 
according to google +25% of the web is duplicate content and there is no problem with that.
they also state multiple times that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.
its a bit older video but still have a look at this:
 
itz_styx said:
they also state multiple times that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.
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Paranoia with duplicate content started at the same point of thin content: with the crawl budget theory.

Most of my worst blogs have been ranking for plenty of duplicate content-based keywords, like the most popular ones: the ones that come from zillions of tags. I remember a time where it was a huge recommendation to put like half million tag per post, just tagging every single aspect of the post, to the point, where tags became almost an abstract.

Now if a search for weird words like ancient greek keywords I find one of my blogs ranking nº1 in the SERPS for that in the /tag/keyword (maybe a 50keyword searches/mo

I've never been a huge fan of crawl budget. But as I have stated in the previous post, if you start a site in a brand new domain with 0 reputation, this little bits, may hinder your growth unless you can invest in some linkbuilding as soon as possible to get as much reputation as possible to "increase" the starting crawl budget, which in the beginning is derisory.
 
jamie3000 said:
I agree that it's a nice-looking and designed website but their content is machine-generated with no real value. I'm fairly sure their review score system is random because every product I've checked so far doesn't have the same review score order as the amazon products.
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No ml or such, this is a script sold by a bhw member. I purchased it a year ago. It has a main text and it adds the post keywords into the text. The best of calculation is just based on amazon ratings, no manual or such.
Strange this site is still keeping up so good
 
DanDD said:
No ml or such, this is a script sold by a bhw member. I purchased it a year ago. It has a main text and it adds the post keywords into the text. The best of calculation is just based on amazon ratings, no manual or such.
Strange this site is still keeping up so good
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Me too. I can't see it for sale anymore and their website is down. But this is a hell of a script. I have done zero promotion or link building and it's making me high $$$/month with no maintenance.
 
blacktrilby said:
Me too. I can't see it for sale anymore and their website is down. But this is a hell of a script. I have done zero promotion or link building and it's making me high $$$/month with no maintenance.
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wait for real? u using expired domains or brand new site?
I didnt have much luck, mainly because i fucked up the expired domain
 
I used a great expired domain I already owned and thought this script would be a great fit. Lucky I guess.
 
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